Supercomputer

IBM has been producing some of the best performing supercomputers in the world for a number of years. In fact, back in 2008 and 2009 IBM developed and launched a supercomputer called Roadrunner. This supercomputer was the first to be able to operate at sustained performance in the petaflop range.

Yesterday was Pi Day, and to celebrate the yearly occasion, you no doubt tried your hardest to recite Pi to as many decimal places as you could. Of course, most of us probably couldn't get past the first few decimal places, but there was one person who could, thanks to a set of computers powered by a handful of NVIDIA graphics cards.

The world obviously needs its supercomputers, but with a growing energy crisis, efficiency is becoming a big priority. The problem is that supercomputers require a lot of power, but that's an issue Eurotech and NVIDIA are trying to solve in the new Eurora computer. Not only is this beast powerful, but NVIDIA has announced that it's also breaking efficiency records for supercomputers.

IBM's infamous Watson supercomputer is making its way to the classroom after appearing on Jeopardy! a while back. IBM announced today that they'll be building another Watson supercomputer and will be giving it to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to be the first university to receive a Watson supercomputer. Other universities are planned to get one in the future.

There have definitely been some weird and crazy movie roles in the past few years, but none may not exceed an upcoming role by Johnny Depp who will play a scientist who gets his brain uploaded into a supercomputer. The upcoming movie will be called Transcendence, and some details about the new film have been revealed today.

This week the folks at NVIDIA are making it clear that the K20 family of Tesla GPU architecture is ready for action, and riding in on the wave of power comes the Titan - K20 accelerated and named world's fastest supercomputer just this morning. The Titan supercomputer works with a beastly 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerator units and makes it clear that this family is more than ready to knock the cap off the processing roof in more ways than one. In addition to being the fastest GPU in the world the K20X model working with the Titan has been revealed as the new #1 entry on the Green500 list for energy efficiency.

It's been revealed this morning that the Titan Supercomputer is not just one impressive beast in and of itself, it's now officially the fastest on the planet. According to the TOP500 list update released this morning at the SC12 Supercomputing Conference, NIVIDA Tesla K20 GPU-accelerated Titan has indeed become the fastest supercomputer on Earth, and has out-done the rest of the supercomputers by a massive amount. Titan works with a massive 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators and has topped the previous record holder here near the end of 2012, that being the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia system.

Today the folks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Cray have brought on the next generation of accelerated computing with not just a re-naming of the Jaguar supercomputer, but integration with NVIDIA's solutions for GPU-powered greatness. This update turns the Titan (as it is now called) into the flagship accelerated computing system - the flagship for the whole world, that is. This is now a 200-cabinet Cray XK7 supercomputer working with 18,688 notes - AMD 16-core Opteron plus NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPUs - enough to change the way we work.

The Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been upgraded, tackling complex climate change calculations with 20 petaflops worth of new processors. Under the (considerable) hood its NVIDIA's "Kepler" GPUs and AMD Opetron 6274 processors doing the heavy lifting, though NVIDIA can't resist pointing out that its graphics chips are in fact carrying 90-percent of the overall load. The GPUs, more commonly found powering gaming rigs, help make Titan "the world's fastest supercomputer for open scientific research."